Melbourne, Australia-born and Reykjavík, Iceland-based, Ben Frost returns to the forefront of experimental composition with his first album in seven years, incorporating electronic elements and industrial atmospheres with infusions of noise and even metallic textures. This last aspect is especially prevalent across Scope Neglect, the record’s fascinating sonic excursions simultaneously familiar and alien, caustic and meditative. Following a limited edition white vinyl release on January 11, the black vinyl, compact disc, and digital are all available now via Mute Records.

Ben Frost made his inroads into the music scene early in this century, self-releasing the CDr EP “Music for Sad Children” in 2001 and making a bigger splash with Steel Wound, which was issued by the Room40 label in 2003. Like many of his experimental contemporaries, he’s amassed an expansive discography, both solo and with numerous collaborators, prolific amongst them Lawrence English, Daníel Bjarnason, Nico Muhly, Tim Hecker, Colin Stetson, and Swans. A significant portion of this work has been composed for film and television, along with dance performances and operas.

For his new record, Frost’s has chosen guitarist Greg Kubacki of the New York band Car Bomb and bassist Liam Andrews of Australian act My Disco to assist in the realization of his vision. Kubacki is front and center in Scope Neglect’s opener “Lamb Shift,” a two and a half minute succession of metal miniatures (with just a touch of electronic residue) that grind and lurch and pause but never manage sustained forward motion.

Functioning not as a subversion or a deconstruction but instead as an overlay of variation and repetition, “Lamb Shift” connects organically (rather than clinically) and also serves as a prelude to “Chimera,” where similar start-stop-start metal-isms are present but used to decidedly different effect as part of a dystopian electronic-tinged landscape.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “It’s all hook-riddled, fast, and ephemeral, and if you don’t love it, your tie’s too wide.” —Entertainment Weekly

Tinted Windows, the supergroup featuring drummer Bun E. Carlos (Cheap Trick), lead vocalist Taylor Hanson (Hanson), guitarist James Iha (Smashing Pumpkins), and the late great bassist Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne, Ivy), is releasing its self-titled album on vinyl for the first time ever. Originally out in 2009 on CD only, BMG is celebrating the 15th anniversary of its release with the exclusive edition of the album for Record Store Day, April 20, 2024.

This version of the album will be on half black/half red vinyl and will feature two rare tracks —”New Cassette,” which was previously only available on the deluxe CD, and “The Dirt,” which was only available on the Japanese CD.

Remembering Mark E. Smith, born on this date in 1957. —Ed.

As The Fall’s constant fount of creativity, vocalist-songwriter Mark E. Smith has attained a rare position in the rock pantheon, with the man and his band exhaustively covered in print form. And so, the publication of Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall might seem an inessential item. However, the objective of editors Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley isn’t biography, but is rather to assemble between hardcovers a series of ambitious essays plus photos of front and back album covers, flyers, correspondence and much more.

Norton and Stanley’s objectives for Excavate! are admirably bold, but it still feels right that the book’s final piece is a eulogy, by Richard McKenna, that was published on January 30, 2018, six days after Smith’s death, for the website We Are the Mutants, of which McKenna is senior editor. It’s also fitting that his opening line functions a bit like tripwire for writers covering this hefty tome who might not have finished the text or indeed even bothered to begin: “Mistrust all eulogies containing the words ‘contrarian,’ ‘curmudgeon’ and ‘national treasure’: these are inevitably the work of hacks.”

It’s pretty clear the author was referring to those either choosing to or fulfilling the given task of eulogizing Smith in the period shortly after his passing, so that hopefully the next sentence in this paragraph will escape McKenna’s harsh judgement (but if not, them’s the breaks). If by now so well-established as to be considered clichés, in the admittedly short interval since his passing, “contrarian” and “curmudgeon” (we’ll set “national treasure” aside for a bit), along with an unquenchable thirst for booze, remain dominant aspects of Mark E. Smith’s persona.

Norton and Stanley’s book doesn’t refurbish his reputation but instead complicates the issue by delving into the outside forces that helped shape Smith’s perspectives and his art. That means the man isn’t always front and center, with the shift of emphasis onto influences artistic, cultural, and environmental driving home that Smith’s antagonisms weren’t kneejerk or for the sake of just being difficult (well, mostly), and that his grumbling and grousing ultimately stemmed from the same complex worldview that shaped his art.

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Inching toward two decades of excellence, HoZac Records of Chicago sprang into being with a focus on wild, raw, and often catchy bands of the moment. With a flag planted firmly in the fertile soil of punk, the label has since branched out into archival recordings and books. Two LPs fresh out from HoZac, BUY + Homework, a reissue of the debut from late ’70s Columbus, OH band Screaming Urge, and Ways of Seeing, a new release by Sardinian/Istanbul post punk-garage supergroup Gentilesky, are covered below.

Busy while active but never breaking out of the original punk-new wave era’s underground, Screaming Urge provides a scuzzy but tuneful template of sorts for much of HoZac’s back catalog (the label’s earlier archival have done the same). With a stature that has retroactively flourished through inclusions on the compilations Killed by Death #6 and Bloodstains Across Ohio, Screaming Urge’s “Homework” also provided titular inspiration for the Hyped2Death label’s extensive series of multi-artist CDr retrospectives, the song itself landing on Homework No.1: American “D.I.Y.” 45s R to T.

Coming together in 1978, Screaming Urge—Michael Ravage (guitar), Myke Rock (bass), Dave Manic (drums)—debuted in 1980 with “Homework” on the A-side of a 45 issued by New Age, a label formed by noted subterranean Ohioans Mike Rep, Tommy Jay, Nudge Squidfish, and Chuck Kubat. The song and its flip “Runaway” kick off HoZac’s expanded reissue, a welcome edition as the original releases are frankly scarce and quite pricy in vinyl form.

“Homework” is a classic hunk of teenage frustration aimed at parents and school and a lack of freedom in general, all done up with infectious punk energy. But with vocals reminiscent of the Wipers’ Greg Sage, “Runaway” nearly steals the show. And if the proper LP’s opener “Hitler’s in Brazil” perhaps suggests an inclination for first wave punk shock value, that’s not really what Screaming Urge was about. Instead, they helped to establish Rock Against Racism in Columbus, played guerilla street shows, and broadened their repertoire with the legit protest number “War.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Sony Music will celebrate the music of Bruce Springsteen next month with a collection of original songs spanning his storied 50-year recording career, from 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ to 2020’s Letter To You.

Best Of Bruce Springsteen will be available on 19th April and will come in physical formats as an 18-track set across 2 LPs or 1 CD—and digitally as an expanded 31-song package. The collection will span early-career favourites like “Growin’ Up” and “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” staples of Springsteen’s live shows from “Dancing In The Dark” to “The Rising,” best-selling breakouts like “Born To Run” and “Hungry Heart,” as well as recent releases “Hello Sunshine” and “Letter To You.” Here, these career-spanning works appear together in one set for the first time. Best Of Bruce Springsteen arrives with an album cover shot by Eric Meola during the Born To Run sessions, as well as new liner notes by Erik Flannigan.

Best Of Bruce Springsteen captures a body of work that has earned Springsteen honours and accolades including 20 GRAMMY Awards, an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, a special Tony Award, the Presidential Medal Of Freedom, a Kennedy Centre Honour and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame.

It has also made Springsteen one of the world’s most in-demand artists—topping 140 million records sold across the globe, more than 70 million in the United States alone and becoming the first artist in history with a Top Five album in six consecutive decades. Springsteen is also one of only four artists to sell more than 20 million concert tickets since 1980—including the highest-grossing worldwide tours of 2012 and 2016.

Before the release of Best Of Bruce Springsteen, he’ll return to the road with The E Street Band later this month, beginning on 19th March in Phoenix, Arizona for a series of 51 shows across North America and Europe. Continuing their first run together since 2016-2017, Springsteen and The E Street Band’s recent tour stops have been hailed as “one of the greatest shows ever” by The Daily Telegraph and “the greatest show on earth” by Billboard. A full list of tour dates is here.

The day you wake up and realize you like Rush is the worst day of your life, you look in the mirror and what you see is nauseating. You spend your entire life hating Rush because Rush are deplorable Prog-Libertarian/Objectivist showoffs and then you wake up one infamous morning and have to admit to yourself that you actually like Rush, or a few of their songs which is bad enough, and it’s the end of you, you’re finished, annihilated. I woke up the other day and had to admit to myself that I actually liked Rush, or at least a few of their songs, and what I saw in the mirror was hideous—a morally repugnant Mr. Hyde capable of any infamy. I looked myself in the mirror and I said, “I don’t know who you are or what you want but you’ve ruined my life.”

Fortunately (as I’ve said ad nauseam) I only like three or four of Rush’s songs, but that’s enough to make me a pariah in the circles I run in. And the only reason I like the one closest to my heart (“Closer to the Heart”) is because it’s hilariously, lovably dumb. Still, we’re talking about Rush, the humor-deprived prog-metal power trio that stormed out of the Great White North playing songs of byzantine complexity complete with Ayn Rand-addled lyrics (check out “Trees,” I dare you).

Their steadfast commitment to playing everything in the most technically complex way possible and total dedication to writing twelve-part songs (complete with Roman numerals!) was unforgivably self-indulgent, and I commend them for coming right out and admitting it in the (twelve parts complete with Roman numerals!) opus “La Villa Strangiato (An Exercise in Self Indulgence).” I also commend bassist/keyboardist and lead castrato Geddy Lee for confessing that he had no idea whatsoever what their 1976 concept album 2112 was about. How endearing!

Unlike their more pop-oriented south-of-the-border neighbors in Kansas and Styx, Rush were the real progressive rock deal, which is to say that their commitment to complex song structures requiring Ubermensch chops rendered them pretentious beyond redemption. A definite love ‘em or hate ‘em proposition, Rush. “The most obnoxious band currently making a killing on the zonked teen circuit” wrote hater and Village Voice scribe Robert Christgau of 1977’s A Farewell to Kings.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The story of Loverboy is akin to a Hollywood movie. Overcoming rejection to eventually become one of Canada’s most successful rock bands of all time and selling millions of albums in the process, is a feel-good story for the ages.

On June 7th, 2024, one of their most incredible live performances will be released for the very first time, in high definition. Live In ‘82 has been lovingly restored by Paul Dean from his personal archive of 16mm film, the joyous energy of a band who helped define the golden era of ’80s music captured like lightning in a bottle. With their great music, colorful clothing, outrageous hairstyles (and headbands!), and terrific soundtracks for movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Top Gun, Loverboy has stood the test of time.

Live In ‘82 will become available on limited CD+Blu-ray, limited LP+DVD and digital streaming and download. Today’s announcement coincides with the launch of the first live track: ‘Turn Me Loose’ is available as digital single and live video.

For more than 40 years, Loverboy has been “Working For The Weekend” (and on the weekend), delighting audiences around the world since forming in 1979, when vocalist Mike Reno was introduced to guitar hot shot Paul Dean—both veterans of several bands on the Canadian scene—at Calgary’s Refinery Night Club. Along with Reno and Dean, Loverboy still includes original members Doug Johnson on keyboards and Matt Frenette on drums, with Ken “Spider” Sinnaeve replacing the late Scott Smith on bass.

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